I have been slow to upload the photos from your granddaughter’s 17th birthday extravaganza. Here they are. Katie had about a dozen of her closest friends over for cake, presents and a sleepover. We loaded everyone in the cars at midnight for the premiere of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. We had a blast. Hope you enjoy the pix.

Jesse and Cleo

I’ve been a little lax in uploading photos to Flickr, but Bill has inspired me. Here is a slide show of Jesse’s week at horse camp with her friends Katie and Val. Read more about her adventure below.

Photo originally posted by humanflowerproject.com

Bill mentioned the playlist I loaded up on my iPod for the trip to Brooklyn Park Saturday for the Ghost Wings Challenge (read all about it here and here). The playlist was heavy with songs from my iTunes database that contained the words “Fire,” “Burn” and “Ghost,” with a few others like “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” thrown in for their predictive appropriateness. Here is the list, in case you are curious. Rock on.

Jesse and Cleo at Lone Rock Ranch in Rosemount (Photoshop goodness by Laurie)

Jesse spent all last week at horse camp at Lone Rock Ranch in Rosemount, part of the summer offerings for teens by ISD 196‘s award-winning Community Ed Department (full disclosure: I sit on the school board for the district and approve the CE budget, so take what I’m saying with an appropriate grain of salt). She had fun, even though her horse, Cleo, was “stubborn and mean,” in Jesse’s words. Cleo apparently bit Jesse and kicked her when Jesse tried to put on the saddle. Nice horsey…. Anyway, the camp was a great way for kids to get a taste of life on a horse ranch and to get in some riding time pretty inexpensively.

Here we are, wearing our badges of honor, in a photo posted by @garciasn (http://www.flickr.com/photos/bill_roehl/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Bill and I hopped in the Suburban Assault Vehicle with Kim and the Nephew this evening and motored over to Girvan Grille in Brooklyn Park for the Ghost Wings Challenge: Eat 10 wings in 15 minutes and win a spiffy T-shirt (Bill and I are posing in ours above) and get your photo on their wall o’ fame. The big, meaty wings, covered in a thick, sweet sauce made from the Bhut jolokia pepper, were the hottest I’ve ever eaten. They were also the tastiest I have ever enjoyed — the sauce was sweet and smoky, with a good hint of garlic. We tried to get executive chef Jim Malinowski to tell us what was in the sauce, but he told us it is the only recipe at the restaurant that he won’t share. But Chef Jim was very generous with his time and gave us a few of the dried Ghost peppers to bring home with us. w00t! I’d love to see him go up against Bobby Flay on Iron Chef America with Ghost chiles as the secret ingredient.

Wings with the bite of the King Cobra, originally posted by @garciasn (http://www.flickr.com/photos/bill_roehl/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

The rules of the challenge were simple, but hard to abide by once you got going. You had to eat all 10 wings, picking them clean. You couldn’t wipe your face or hands with a napkin or handkerchief. And you couldn’t eat or drink anything else during the challenge. Oh, yeah, and if you gobbled everything down really quickly, you still had to wait the full 15 minutes for the challenge to be completed. The first few bites were tentative as we tested the potency of the sauce. Almost immediately, our tongues and lips caught fire. Another real challenge: the wings were piping hot right out of the kitchen, so we had to be careful not to burn our tongues and mouths by eating the wings too quickly. After my first few bites of saucy goodness, my tongue felt like it was swelling up, then it and my lips went numb. Early on, Bill and I figured out we needed to set a steady pace designed to have us finished by the end of the 15 minutes, but not too soon before the buzzer. We did very well at that, both of us eating steadily and getting down to one wing with about a minute to go. Restaurant manager Jon Fehrmann told us we would know if we were going to finish by the third wing. He was spot on. That’s when the endorphins really kicked in. Bill said he was getting dizzy and his nose and lips glowed bright red. My eyes swelled and tears ran down my face. My nose started running after the seventh or eighth wing. I stopped talking and laughing as I started eating wing four. Letting oxygen into my mouth just caused the flames to flare up. I began to feel lightheaded and tried to remain focused on eating the wings one at a time. I had to keep reminding myself not to lick the extra sauce off my fingers and not to reach for my glass of water or my napkin.Bill and I both paused for a half-minute or so after wing nine. That, at least for me, turned out to be a mistake. That gave my brain time to catch up with the intense pain in my mouth, throat and intestines. When I bit into wing 10 with a minute to go, the pain was at its most concentrated.

It seemed like half the restaurant staff gathered around our table to cheer us on. The chefs and several other kitchen crew kept offering us encouragement. We also had a great waitress who kept the time for us during the challenge. What a great experience. The folks at Girvan Grille really made us feel at home and treated us like VIPs. Not to mention that their prices are quite reasonable (our wings were under 10 bucks) and the rest of the food really tasty, according to Kim and the Nephew. I would highly recommend the Girvan Grille.

The best part of the whole experience is that Bill and I will be invited back in a few weeks for the Girvan Grille’s Ghost Wing Tournament of Champions, pitting the folks who have conquered the challenge against each other to see who can eat the most Ghost Wings in a set amount of time. Bill and I are pumped! Plus, we get to eat for free as champs! Now I know how the gladiators must have felt in Rome (maybe a better analogy might be sumo wrestlers, given my bloated belly…)

Check Bill’s site in the morning to get his take on the whole ordeal. In the meantime, you can find the rest of his pix in his Flickr photostream and watch a video of us eatin’ our wings on the YouTubes.

Wings on grill, courtesy of @garciasn (http://www.flickr.com/photos/bill_roehl/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Bill Roehl and I continued our training regimen today, preparing for next weekend’s Ghost Wing Challenge (10 wings, slathered in bhut jolokia (“ghost”) pepper sauce, in 15 minutes = free T-shirt. w00t!) Despairing of finding any wings even remotely hot enough here south of the river, we decided to make our own. Bill marinated three pounds of wings in Frank’s and some cut-up cayennes for several days to lay down a base. Then we smoked them on my new grill, with mesquite and hickory chips soaked in (cheap, undrinkable) beer. We basted them with Bill’s marinade to keep everything moist. The finishing touch was a bath in one of two sauces — Original Anchor Bar Wing Sauce (Hotter formula) or Famous Dave’s Devil’s Spit BBQ sauce. Each of these sauces was amended beforehand with five, fat diced habaneros (seeds and all) and allowed to percolate for about an hour. Both sauces tasted much better after the peppers were added. Devil’s Spit is usually my go-to BBQ sauce when I’m eating ribs because it has a little bit of a tang and good flavor. Bill’s wife, Kim, Katie and Laurie ate brats — the wings were too hot for them. Nephew Michael ate the wings and declared them the best he ever had. Not braggin’. Just sayin’. Were the wings good? Just look at the picture below that Bill snapped as I ate. I look like an extra on the set of “Dexter.”

The horror! The horror! by @garciasn (http://www.flickr.com/photos/bill_roehl/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Here are a couple of cute photos of Jesse, one walking through a fountain at Canal Park and the other of her feeding the birds french fries at an art fair.

It's not the beach, but it'll have to do

Where's Tippi Hedren when you need her?

Elvis Costello and the Imposters

Unbelievable show this evening by Elvis Costello at Taste of Minnesota. He dug deep into his archive for hits from just about every album. Highlights were “Radio Sweetheart” (with Van Morrison’s “Jackie Wilson Says” thrown into the middle), “(I Don’t Want to Go to) Chelsea,” “Monkey to Man,” a hopping new tune called “Sulphur To Sugarcane” a truly amazing “Watching the Detectives,” and the phenomenal encore of “Alison” and “What’s So Funny (‘Bout Peace, Love and Understanding)?”

We got to the festival early in the afternoon to watch The Vogues, which got rained out halfway through. Walked around looking at junk for sale, checked out Uncle Chunk’s show, then settled in for a short set by new talent Kate Voegele. Nice voice and easy on the eyes. Not a bad combination. Ate some overpriced fair food at the booths before the big event. Had a pretty good vantage point right in the center, just outside the paid seats. Elvis kept beckoning the crowd to come inside the barricades and sit in the paid seats, but the security bruisers kept taking ‘em down and hauling ‘em out when they tried.

While Elvis played, I kept remembering Mary Kay Lambert’s pool party in Virginia Beach back in 1978. I went into her house and took the record that was playing off the turntable (I think it was Frampton Comes Alive) and I put on My Aim is True, which I had just plunked own a cool $4.99 for at the record store. There were many shouts of protests, until Elvis revved into “Welcome to the Working Week,” followed by “Miracle Man.” By the time we got to the end of side 1, people were jumping. They had to hear side 2 of this record that sounded like nothing we had ever heard before. As you can see, Elvis and I go back a ways.

Tonight, Elvis was in fine form, both in voice and guitar-playing. He rocked for close to two hours, barely pausing between songs. When you have more than three decades of hits and you’re still making new, relevant music, it’s a real race to get through your catalog in one two-hour show.

This will have to go down as one of my top 10 concerts of all time. Yes, I enjoyed it that much. Sorry, Jeni, you missed a great one.

Kate Voegele, my new favorite singer.

Eagan gator, shown actual size

Guess what the cops pulled out of a pond just up the road from us in Eagan? A gator. That’s right, global warming deniers. A friggin’ tropical lizard swimming around a pond in a residential area, trolling for chihuahuas.

Here’s a map showing our house and where the pair-of-boots-on-the-half-shell was found and subdued by Eagan Police (A), just a short gator hop from Chez Mooses (B). Gators don’t know how to use GoogleMaps, do they?

Jo, Di and Leah perform Riding Free from Joanne’s new album, Bitter Tears Sacred Ground, a tribute to Johnny Cash, Floyd “Red Crow” Westerman, and Peter LaFarge, at the Fond du Lac Reservation on June 28: